www.poetsandartists.com publishing as an art form Publisher /E.LC DIDI MENENDEZ Creative Director I. M. BESS Poetry Editors DAVID KRUMP MELISSA McEWEN Reviewer GRADY HARP m Copyright reverts back to contributors upon publication. O&S: PoetsandArtists.com requests first publisher rights of poems published in future reprints of books, anthologies, website publications, podcasts, radio, etc. The full issue is available for viewing online from the Poets and Artists website. For submission guidelines and further information, please stop by www.poetsandartists.com CO artists and poets O O 4 Francien Krieg 1 0 Carol Lynn Grellas 1 2 Javier Arizabalo 1 9 Caroline Berry Klocksiem 24 Daniela Petrova 25 Ken Scaglia 30 Kathleen Martin Rowe 31 George McKim 32 Alison Cherry 38 Simone Muench 42 F. Scott Hess 48 Steven Gulvezan 49 Sheila E. Murphy 54 Peter Ramos 56 Alexandra Manukyan 62 Harger Boal 63 David Jon Kassan 64 Steven DaLuz 66 Angelique Moselle Price 68 Kamalky Laureano 70 William Lazos reviews 20 Miguel Angel Reyes 50 Deborah Poynton Francien Krieg www.francienkrieg.com Photograph by Ron Zwagemaker 4 poetsandartists.com Francien Krieg (1973) lives and works in The Hague, The Netherlands. In the studio of Francien Krieg a glass is displayed with bird skulls and a small fetus in a jar. It is noticeable that transience of nature intrigues her. In the work of Krieg the theme of transience concentrates on the naked body of elderly women. Krieg paints the naked woman unpolished and realistic, as a pure human being. The beauty of imperfection becomes clear in her raw, poetic art and has the capacity to touch the observer. Krieg always painted human beings. At first she was intrigued by the form of the human body, but gradually her fascination with the texture and the colors of the human skin increased which is expressed in her realistic style. She tried once to show the inner side of human beings, but that did not appeal to her. "I think the inside is bloody and nasty, while the outside is interesting for me. The wrinkles and varicose veins of the elderly are to most people an illustration of imperfection, but to me they depict beauty. According to me, a smooth, polished skin is less interesting then an aged skin. Painting the unpolished, aged skin is a way to express the inside." Krieg exhibits in the Netherlands and abroad. Her work is presented in different collections, like the ING art collection, the Howard Tullman collection. Museum van Lien, Scheringa collection and several private collections. In the Netherlands she cooperates with gallery AAokum in Amsterdam and her paintings are displayed on several art exhibitions, like in Charleston in the Robert Lange studios. In October 2010 she is collaborating in an exhibition entitled 'Broos' (fragile) of 6 women exploring the same theme. They all show, each from the point of view of their own discipline, confronting and revealing portraits: the sincere and imperfect human being. www.broosexpo.nl. Outside oil on canvas 180x70cm poetsandartists.com 5 6 poetsandartists.com Marked oil on canvas 120x80cm Fade oil on canvas 120x80cm Q&A Francien Krieg Explain your process: I allways look around for new models which I think are special in a way. The last couple of years the models are mostly elderly people. Most of them I know very well. For me it is important that my model understands my motivation and relates to it. I start with making a series of photos and choose the one that touches me the most. Then I make a drawing straight on the canvas. In 5 to 8 layers I build up the painting. Every subsequent layer is more refining. I work on more canvasses at the same time. These switches help me to stay objective and prevent me from overdoing a certain painting. The most beautiful thing that can happen is when a painting surprises me, which make me really happy and excited. What is your pet peeve? (regarding today's art scene) According to my opinion, a lot of artists try too hard to be original or just follow a trend. In my opinion this doesn't work. The only way is to stay true to yourself and figure out what you really want to say with your work. It has to come from your heart. How does your family life come into play with your artistic life? My fiance is a salesman and very supportive about my career. He helps me to act more like a businesswoman. In the art academy you don't learn how to deal with gallery owners and art buyers. So I am very thankful to have him in my life. He also understands how important painting is to me, he never complains when I keep on working in the evening. How has digital accessibility come into play with your work? Thanks to the internet artists can work more independently. For example, I can show my portfolio on the web and get in touch with many buyers and art lovers from abroad. The web also helped me to contact 'poets and artists'. So in a way it opens more doors. I was even in a controversial Arabic magazine Jasad which evoked great emotional responses. It is great that through internet people on the other side of the world can have discussions about my work. What is your preferred medium and why? I always use oil paint, from the brand 'Oud Holland', it is a high quality paint with strong pigments. Furthermore, because I paint inhouse I prefer soft soap to clean my brushes rather then terpentine, which smells really badly. I use medium Liquin, because it dries pretty fast and it is nice to work with. Do you collect any art yourself and if so what if anything, was the first piece you sold or gave to someone? When I was working at the academy I sometimes exchanged works with colleagues. The first painting I bought was from a colleague with whom I was following a master class; I was so impressed with his result that I bought his painting for 100 euro .The teacher was upset because he also wanted to buy it from him. poetsandartists.com 7 8 poetsandartists.com Wake Up oil on canvas 150x100cm Landscape of Old Age oil on canvas 120x60cm Have you ever edited your work or censored anything for fear of offending someone? No never, and I never will! Once I had an assignment which turned out to be an ugly experience. I was making a portrait of a man, who thought he still looked like a young god but you could see he had lived a pretty rough life. He was a very busy man and had no time to see the progress of the work. So one day I showed him the finished painting. He became very angry because I painted his love handles. I refused to change the painting and after a long struggle he sent me the painting back, cut in a thousand pieces. You can understand that I am not a b\g fan of working in assignment anymore since this incident.. Do you believe art should serve a political purpose or remain neutral? For me good art is open to different interpretations. According to me, art has depth and quality when it makes you think about something or evokes strong emotions. Personally I don't like happy and beautiful art, there should be something in a work of art that disturbs me. What painting to you have hanging in your living room? I have a huge work of 250 x 1 00 meters hanging in my living room, it is a painting of me lying naked in the bath. Sometimes when I have a visitor they react surprised to see this painting. They get uncomfortable seeing this huge nude. Although I understand their reaction, I feel rather objective towards this painting, I am just a model. Why are you a painter? Because I think It is beautiful how I can express myself without words and start a discussion just by using paint, I have always been creative and I cannot imagine doing something else. 'We are confronted daily with a one-sided image of what women's beauty should be: a polished and concealed image. I want to show another side. According to me, the visible expression of life experiences contains beauty because it shows pure h U ma nity . " — Francien Krieg Photograph by Ron Zwagemaker poetsandartists.com 9 Carol Lynn Grellas http://www.clgrellaspoetry.com Carol Lynn Grellas is a four-time Pushcart nominee and a 2010 Best of the Net nominee. She is the author of five chapbooks: The Butterfly Room, soon to be released from Big Table Publishing Company, Breakfast in Winter (Flutter Press 2010) Litany of Finger Prayers (Pudding House Press 2009) Object of Desire (Finishing Line Press 2008), A Thousand Tiny Sorrows (March Street Press 2010) and two electronic chaps: Desired Things (Gold wake Press 2009) To the Children (Victorian Violet Press 2010). Her collection. The Epistemology of an Odd Girl will be forthcoming from Diminuendo Press. She lives in El Dorado Hills, California. Lament for You You were a disciple in search of ecstasy or pain; a petal rising towards the summer heat, your mouth parched, high from paper laced with LSD. Death was always lurking deep within your veins; your blueprint drawn in human-vellum, though no one else could see beyond your china-skin, lips dyed and glossed in need of sin. Once we sat on a picket-fence; our linen dresses catching wind like gaping parasols in an unexpected storm; the grass warm beneath our feet and I remember loving you, the way you lazed about the river's edge, weepy wildflowers woven in your hair with dandelion dust haloing your face, magnificent as heaven. Sometimes I gaze beyond my window, past all the years of being me, beyond this place of grieving and I can see you there swathed in a gown of flaxen silk, hair whipping round in a flurried nimbus of copper-rain, like stars splayed throughout the darkness, so far, yet close, not young nor old, your heart wide open from your last big overdose; the devil laughing in your eyes. 1 O poetsandartists.com Before Waking He's the stranger you almost know his face remembered through a haze in morning, eyes half-open with a vision of you in your odalisque-pose lounging after a midnight tryst; the scent of skin still lingering between a braided twist of sheets. The two of you coupled like a wisteria tree, your clothes strewn about the room as if both bodies were ablaze while you disrobed for the sake of too much heat, lest the burning grew outside in, your skin; a silky blend of nudeness wrapped around him with shadows married on the wall, until you wake and there's no-one there at all, it's just you in an empty room, the light flipped off by the window's frame, a cocktail dress slung over a fiddle-back chair, last night's highball leaked through the hint of musty air and a dreamed-up lover without a name. Exbrook 7-4559/ Your Little Black Book Here's to the rumpled letters you saved, the scent of citrus upon your return when I was almost sleeping, knowing your love for tangerines after a moonlight tryst. The stars she gave you, twinkling through the lining of your coat as you'd gloat at little gifts unseen but always there, everything you spoke in French that made me weep, practiced first on her, one spared cigarette in a lipstick case, her face in the mirror overriding my reflection, the kiln half-open before I heard you step through the door, a moment more would have proved a different outcome, but you were early that night. Forgive me darling, the mushrooms begged me not to but you were so deserving of this wrongdoing and the locket with her hair took me far beyond the thought of murder, into Schadenfreude as you chewed that last spore of poison and I called her on the phone and said, come over- come over end take your things. Q&A If someone offered you one million dollars to never write a poem again, would you accept the offer? As much as my husband would want me to accept this offer, poetry has been my guiding light and I could never devalue it for money. How many publications do you subscribe to? Which publications are these? How many do you read cover to cover? I find new publications to subscribe to all the time, but at the moment I've been enjoying: Rattle, Rhino, Poets & Writers and Margie, to name a few. I read them all cover to cover and I often read them over and over. This is my hope with my own writing as well; that someone will find one poem worthy enough to save it to read again and again. What percentage of your writing do you submit for publication? My guess is that I submit about half of what I write for publication. I'm always working on poems that are waiting to be sent out, although I realize some will never be ready. This is a never-ending process as well as a challenge, knowing which poems are really done. How do you identify the trigger that begins the poetic process? It's a restlessness that starts to build like an internal wind wanting to blow. Some days a storm is coming through and some days it's just a small delta breeze, but nothing can really stop it once it begins. There's a sense of relief when it's over as if I've made it through something and I'm better for it. poetsandartists.com 1 1 Javier Aiizabalo www.javierarizabalo.com After studying with different painting and drawing teachers in his home town of Irun, Javier Arizabalo earned a degree in raphic Techniques at the Bilbao Faculty of Fine Art. He then worked for fifteen years as a graphic designer, while indulging his love of photography and the synthetic image. In 2006 he changed his focus, choosing to concentrate on painting - an activity which since childhood he has found much more personal independent, gratifying and natura Javier Arizabalo What is your pet peeve? (regarding today's art scene) For both artist and spectator, art is a mixture of seeing, thinking, feeling and acting. Saying something is "modern" or very "now" can be misleading, since it may be taken to mean that a piece is more modern or cutting edge if it uses new technologies, is more obvious, has recourse to fashionable languages or utilises grandiloquent spaces. Art is everything that is "now", not that which claims to be art just because it constitutes a new formulation. Therefore, describing something as "modern" or "now" is a mistake. It is possible not to understand a work created recently, yet understand one which was completed centuries ago; in this case, this "old" work becomes part of our present and is "modern" or "now". How has digitai accessibility come into piay with your work? Digital photography has helped me work with the object, composition and visualisation of results, although working with a two-dimensional image is a much poorer experience than working with the real 1 4 poetsandartists.com Fig0210 oil on canvas 195x86cm thing. Reality involves greater powers of abstraction in order to move from three to two dimensions, it gives more plastic information and is ever-changing. What is your preferred medium and why? Oils, because they give you time to play around and the variability in tone and colour during the drying process (oxidation) is not too great. Their capacity for being opaque or transparent, smooth or textured, etc. makes working with oils the richest and most subtle technique for applying colour. Do you beiieve art shouid serve a potiticai purpose or remain neutrat? First we need to specify what art is. In the broad sense of the term, it is interaction with time, space and material, and if it is used for a purpose, either with or for another person (in the social sense), then it is always political. If the question is related more to "politics", then we should bear in mind that the artistic object changes depending on its context; it is never neutral, just as the observer is never neutral. The simple act of exhibiting is a political act, targeted at others. poetsandartists.com 1 5 Fig0310 oil on canvas 46x33cm "For many years, in my works, I thought I had to tell a story or use technique to articulate a reason, but I always had trouble knowing what exactly the story or content was. Apparently without realising it, I discovered the importance of experiencing the artistic action (with a learned classical technique) and of enjoying the process. I realised that it was not necessary to tell a story, it is enough to evoke empathy and feeling in the viewer. Closed eyes or a simple gesture can be meaningful signs that move us deeply." — Javier Arizabaio Why are you a painter? Ever since I was a small child, painting or plastic art has enabled me to connect to and act with the material. It has, more than any other activity, enabled me to improve my concentration, overcome my anxieties, gain a sense of achievement and carry out my projects. We all have access to these abilities - it depends on what type of stimulation we have received. How iong does one of your pieces take to finish? It depends on the purpose and the format. I normally feel comfortable taking between two weeks and one month. The best way to go about things is not to think about time, but rather to respond to the needs that have prompted you to start work on the project, not from a mechanical perspective, with a watch strapped to your wrist, but rather from the point of view of experienced time and emotions. 1 6 poetsandartists.com RIGHT: ManoOl 10 oil on canvas 1 1 6x73cm Cristina oil on canvas 73x55cm Introspective: Cristina 1 8 poetsandartists.com This was a commissioned piece which drew me away from the concept of beauty that is idealised in all things young, pushing me instead towards something much more real and human. It also forced me to stretch the limits of working on the details. It could have been other pieces, because every work involves experimentation and change. Is it possible to say that one kind of experiment has had a greater influence than others? If we were to do so, perhaps such an assessment of the past would surprise us. Javier Arizabalo Caroline Berry Klocksiem Caroline Klocksiem's poems have most recently appeared in, or are forthcoming from The Literary Bohemian, Precipitate, and Hay den's Ferry Review. Originally from South Carolina, she's a graduate of Arizona State University's MFA program, a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient, and co- poetry editor for 42opus. Q&A Skepticism of everything Sometimes I only want to have a child so my singing can be remembered by someone as better than it really is. The warbly weed whacker squeals and mower's low nags fly to the window, waking me. Wailing and the neighbor's kitchen cabinets smack shut through the walls. I am waiting for that moment other than dread. What if this whole existence is the sum of genetics and fuck yous? I suppose when I look at my husband that 80% of the time he is thinking of the book he is reading. Or else some phenomenological error. Or else, a post to his colleague's blog. 1 00% of the time I see my mother's face, I feel her fingers write words on my back. I have never believed cheers to be an acceptable form of saying goodbye. Skepticism of everything is exhausting. My television is almost always on, which means right now the woman with fourteen babies is muted, overwhelmingly on. At the party I joked about her belly pissed off the ice-cold midwife. Probably even then should have added theoretically. Do you seek feedback from anyone, any group, as you write or is it a purely private, solitary process? Note taking and drafting are always solitary, but the revision process isn't necessarily so. Sometimes when I'm struggling with a decision or feel stuck I'll show a draft to trusted writer friends. Seeing the writing through fresh eyes can help me understand the poem in a new way, and may even spark new ones. When can you tell a poem is finished, that is, not in need of further polishing? It depends on the poem, but usually I think about this in terms of what the poem is revealing and hiding. If I'm overwriting, you'll be bored. If I'm not writing enough, the poem might be cryptic and easy to give up on. I ask myself if I have a balance that drives the poem, makes it dynamic, and makes it attractive and engaging to you, dear reader. If I think I do, then I'm happy with it. Sometimes, though, I get tricked and think I'm "finished" only to realize weeks later that I need to cut 10 lines. Is writing daily important to your gestational period of arriving at the moment of finding something you want to say? Regularly scheduled writing is important, but not necessarily every day. I do think that reading every day is crucial, though. Which of your senses (tactile, olfactory, visual, auditory, heart) is your most reliable or most often used launching pad? Visual. Big time. Why does this poem suck? I'm gonna skirt the question here a little bit and say that, while I wouldn't say this poem "sucks," I will say that I haven't had the smoothest relationship with it. It was stubborn, more challenging, and more time- consuming to revise than others. It's also somewhat uncomfortable for me because it's way more autobiographical than what might be considered typical for me. poetsandartists.com 1 9 Miguel Angel RAW PORTRAITS, RAW COLOR, RAW PASSION by Grady Harp MEETING Miguel Angel Reyes on the street, taking photographs of interesting people, buildings, portions of signage, graffiti or murals the flaneur would never expect the raw, expressionist paintings that will result from this gentle intense giant's use of these moments he extracts from life. Reyes is a quiet man whose energy explodes on canvas and paper in strikingly vivid paintings, making him one of the most easily recognized artists in the Hispanic genre of Los Angeles. Born in Colima, Mexico in 1 964, Reyes and his family moved north and lived in the barrio a few blocks from the US/Mexican border: his childhood memories of the people of the night moving in 20 poetsandartists.com Sections of the mural Amistades (Friendship) There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference." Juan Montalvo and out of the shadows as they struggled to cross the forbidden 'la linea' into the United States would later influence his obsession with painting faces of those the night made anonymous. His family immigrated to the United States in 1 975 and knowing his passion for art he studied at the Otis Parsons School of Design, gaining his degree in 1 987. And since that time he has been occupied full time as an artist and a teacher, mastering printmaking at Self-Help Graphics, in addition to the skills he owns as a draughtsman, painter, muralist and illustrator, becoming skilled at photography which has served him well as a source for models and for concepts for other paintings. Reyes works from the model in the studio and the images that result from these sessions attest to poetsandartists.com 21 Sections of the mural Amistades (Friendship) his observational abilities of human anatomy. But it is from the photographs, taken in both direct sunlight and at night with the light source from neon or street lamps or clubs or simply the ambiance of the raucous streets, that his most exciting images emerge. His palette is toward the hot end of the color spectrum and his use of light is at times startling, even acrid. In his portraits shown here his images range from very closely cropped portions of the face to images that include the torso: the magic of how artificial light from night sources of illumination gives his imagery an intensity and a bite that suggests a barrio influence. Not all of Reyes' paintings or prints are figurative. His ability to create massive flower portraits has been responsible for some of the commissioned murals in and around Los Angeles. His largest project. Amistades (Friendship), was a Metrorail Construction Fence Project at Hollywood and Argyle, a mixture of faces and flowers - flora and fauna - created in conjunction with Luis Reyes and Ron Sandoval that was unfortunately removed when the Metro Line was completed. Reyes describes the project as follows: These portraits ore reol people, not icons, superior beings or contrived theatrical get ups. I'm interested in doing a likeness that feels like the person instead of just looking like the person. '. Though Los Angeles remains his home, his influence on the Hispanic art movement and his growing list of exhibitions and commissions have been viewed throughout the United States including San Francisco, Chicago and Austin, Texas, and he has been the recipient of many awards not only for his art but also for his contributions to the support of AIDS projects, for Amigos y Amantes (Friends & Lovers), an art exhibition and fundraiser to benefit AIDS Healthcare Foundation's free AIDS treatment clinics in Mexico, and the dignity of the gay community. Miguel Angel Reyes' art breathes life lived to its capacity and his commitment to creating understanding and appreciation of Hispanic culture makes his work valiant as well as intoxicatingly beautiful. v Every man is the son of his own works." Miguel de Cervantes Daniela Petrova Daniela Petrova is a New York-based writer, born and raised in communist Bulgaria. Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in literary journals, newspapers, and anthologies, including Best New Writing 2008 (Hopewell Publications, 2008) and the Christian Science Monitor. She is currently working on a novel. Q&A When can you tell a poem is finished, that is, not in need of further polishing? Poems for me are emotional outbursts that — like crying — end when I feel emptied out. I will then come back to it in a few hours or days or even months (depending on how excited I'm about the poem). I love finding poems that I've written months earlier and forgotten all about. I can better see what needs to be done. I wish I could say that I polish my poems incessantly but I am just too impatient. I simply close my eyes and let them sail down the stream. The bad ones inevitably sink. Is writing daily important to your gestational period of arriving at the moment of finding something you want to say? Usually the things that want to be said find me. But writing regularly helps me learn how to tell them better. If someone offered you one million dollars to never write a poem again, would you accept the offer? Is that what happened to J.D. Salinger? The birth of a poem is so intoxicating. The moment it clicks and you recognize your feelings translated into words, that moment is as exhilarating as the high you get from running a marathon or conquering Everest or winning a million dollars in the lottery. And the thing about poetry is that you can win numerous times a day, every day. Why does this poem suck? I am not happy with a poem unless it puts a lump in my throat. What is your goal as a poet? I became a writer when in third grade I had to bring to school a poem about the Bulgarian partisans. I failed to find any such poems (read: I was too lazy to bother) and did the simplest thing — I wrote one myself. I don't belief in divine inspiration and predestination or any other romanticized notions about writing. I write because I like it. Some people get up at 5 am to run 1 5 miles? Go figure. The First VCR Behind the Iron Curtain People crowded in our living room, choked in cigarette smoke and smelling of feet, to watch bootleg videos smuggled from America. You could tell our apartment by the shoes of all sizes piled outside the door. We sat two to a chair and on the floor on the thin wall-to-wall carpet the same color and design as the neighbors' above and below us. Clouds of smoke floated in the bluish light, the balcony door tightly shut to keep government informants out. Years later, down Fifth Avenue I pass a stranger in a raincoat and recognize the old familiar face. I stop and turn. "Yep, it's Woody Allen," says a woman with a Golden Retriever. I watch the frail silhouette walk away and remember the fear-filled nights behind the Iron curtain. 24 poetsandartists.com Ken Scaglia www.kenscagliastudios.com Ken Scaglia was born in 1959 and raised in Indiana. A love of drawing has always assisted the production of his ideas. After receiving degrees in Industrial Illustration and Visual Communication Design from Purdue University in 1979 and 1984, he worked in Columbus, Ohio. Moving back to his father's home state, he received an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University in 1990. He has since freelanced as a publication and product designer, illustrator, painter and teacher. Self-taught, he began painting in earnest in 2005, seeking an outlet from the radically changing world of graphic design. Group shows in local art organizations lead to his first solo show in 2008 at the Westport Arts Center. His latest show was at the Flinn Gallery in Greenwich, CT. His work was recently seen in American Art Collector magazine, and will appear in 700 Artists of New England in 2011. He lives and works out of a home studio in Connecticut. ,Ken Scaglia Do you have a ritual you follow before each new work is started? I photograph cars and motorcycles I find at car shows, car cruises or roadsides. I then crop the photos on my Mac to find the best compositions and proportions. I'm looking for something compelling to me. Color, line, lighting point-of-view. I approach each new painting as an attempt to render a satisfying composition. It just happens to be recognizable as a car. I go through this process for weeks sometimes. Some paintings are from retrieved images I took decades ago. Once the selection is made and transferred to canvas, I'm emotionally invested in the painting. Then I start with the sky. Always. It sets the dreamscape for me. How does your family life come into play with your artistic life? I desperately strive for a balance between family and painting. This is a charged question for me. If painting were gone from me, but I still have my family, I could live with that. I am recognizing my art as an important part of me, but the care I give my family is just as much a creative effort. They generally like it when I'm concentrating and lost in a new piece. I'm calm and focused. What is your preferred medium and why? A simple question, but this delves a little deeper into my motivations, I think. I use acrylics on stretched canvas, cotton or linen, linen is very nice. I'm impatient with the paint drying, yet I'll stand and work for hours to get a look just right. Always a dichotomy. I work this way to challenge myself, bet myself I can't possibly create super smooth chrome or sky reflections with just paintbrush and paint on canvas. What tool or supply can you not live/work without? That would have to be my double- sided easel. I sized it for my studio and it's worked out beautifully. And a real nice small sable brush, not too beat up. Oh, and I found a lot of ambient music stations on the internet that set a good timeless mood. Why are you a painter? I paint to give others a glimpse into my view of the world. I marvel at how things look in light. I love to see an image I chose come to life in paint. I still have "Wow!" moments when I finish. I paint because I feel kinship with other artists I've looked at and admired. How long does one of your pieces take to finish? I have finished some in as little as 2 weeks, from photo to varnish. In general, an involved painting will occupy 4 to 5 weeks in the studio. Yellow Fin acrylic 36"xl8" TOP: Special Oil Bath acrylic 30"x30" • ABOVE: Red Tail acrylic 20"x60" poetsandartists.com 27 "I translate my fascination with automobilia into quiet portraits. I search for images that connect with nostalgic memories of collectors and admirers alike." — Kenscagiia 28 poetsandartists.com ABOVE: Black and Blue acrylic 40"x30" Arrangement in Grey and Black: Barrels acrylic 30"x30" Introspective: Arrangement in Grey and Black: Barrels The image I call Arrangement in Grey and Black: Barrels was my biggest challenge lately. I struggled with proportions right away, arriving at a square after deciding it was a challenging shape and that it suited the pattern and geometry of the engine. I was looking for asymmetrical balance on the edges, while the center focus would be the repetition of the chrome barrels. I felt the simple, monochromatic palette would allow the engine details to read through to the viewer, too much additional color would create viewer hardship. Some days I spent hours on a 3 x 4 inch area of canvas rendering the aluminum and chrome. This was a physically demanding piece for me, yet very satisfying for the result. Ken Scaglia poetsandartists.com 29 Kathleen Martin Rowe Non-Native Speaker It's always the same story with her, how they came to own her mouth and all but English were untied, every word sacrificed to the gale. In the tale, she is never sad or happy even though she lost all her first ideas. The children like to think we would have stuffed all that language in our mouths, tenderly, like robin's eggs. Used our best square knots to tie it down — or nails, string, whatever. Lost language may explain why later she could not speak her mind. Could not cup even one dragonfly wing in her otherwise powerful hand. So that when the wrong suitor stood on her doorstep she simply blew the iridescent specks off her palms and let him in. Q8cA When can you tell a poem is finished, that is, not in need of further polishing? I can't. When I get tired of a poem, I set it aside. If when I come back to it (weeks, months or years later), I find anything surprising or pleasing, I will keep working on it and send it out. I revise rejected poems. Very rarely a poem comes to me quickly and unambiguously. Sometimes it takes a very long break, maybe several years, before I can see what's wrong with a poem and how it can be salvaged. Some poems can't be salvaged, or I don't how to fix them. A poem for me is never really finished. What is your revision process? I like to tinker. Sometimes I will write many pages and then slowly whittle it down to something useful. Sometimes I use constraints, like line length or overall length of the poem, or make a rule against metaphors, or something like that, to help get a poem to a new place. Often I give myself a writing assignment. For instance, write a poem with sections of haiku. Write a poem integrating corn and mental illness. What is your goal as a poet? My goal is to surprise the reader and stir emotion. These are my favorite kinds of poems. I like poems in which language is the object, the artistic material, that has been shaped so precisely that it brings deep pleasure to the reader, even if the feelings are not pleasant or experience of the poem is difficult. I like a poem that fights with me a little. I like to be confused yet intrigued by a poem; a poem should be attractive, a little seductive. A poem can be either too transparent and closed in meaning, and therefore boring, or it can be too difficult and opaque. I would like for mine to fall somewhere in between. Actually, I don't think a poem can be too difficult. If I give up on a difficult poem, it's because of my own impatience or ignorance. But I want to write and read poems that aim for a little seduction. Also, it annoys me when when the speaker of a poem is too precious, a little too in love with the poem. When I see this in my poems, I try to kill it. I don't like poems that take themselves too seriously. My poems usually take themselves too seriously. I would like to write poetry that contains an element of "lightness," as outlined by Calvino when he suggests that literature is "the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living." How do you identify the trigger that begins the poetic process? It helps when I'm writing regularly. I also carry a small notebook with me and often a line or a title will present itself as Kate Martin Rowe writes poetry and short stories and has published work in The Beloit Poetry Journal California Quarterly, Chaparral, Prick of the Spindle, and Eclipse. She teaches composition at LA City College and Glendale Community College and lives in Eagle Rock with her husband and two extremely lazy cats. I'm participating in daily life. I sometimes attempt a poem with one of these lines or themes. But usually my best ideas sneak in while I'm in the process of writing. How much does the need to fictionalize' your thought that flows out as a poem influence what you write? I'm interested in being truthful but not necessarily factual. And many times the best writing comes when I let go of trying to nail down a thought precisely and let things onto the page that are from a more unconscious area. Recognizing that all writing comes from somewhere, being influenced by experience, memory, reading, things we've heard and believed, I still have to lose myself a little in order to dodge my own expectations and hang ups about my writing. In the revision process I can bring out the critical eye. To write anything, I have to be willing to let go of the facts and let the language take over. I often put things in a poem because they sound good to me and only later consider whether they are true or sensible. When I say "sensible" I mean whether or not I have provided enough connections, or whether I have thought enough about what the writing actually says versus what I wanted to say. Often, the less clear, direct or factual thing is the thing that feels most right and true. 30 poetsandartists.com George McKim interfenestrcrtion George McKim's poetry has been accepted for electronic or print publication, or has been published, in Viral Cat, Tupelo Press Sappho Poetry Project Leaf Garden Press, 7 x 20 Journal Eunoia, escarp, Eviscerator Heaven, Carcinogenic Poetry, Rust and Moth Journal, Hanging Moss Journal, http:// ChicagoPoetry.com/ - Cram 6 (print). Crossing Rivers into Twilight Journal, Simply Haiku, Everyday Poets and Everyday Poets Anthology (print). He is the editor of the poetry journal - Psychic Meatloaf. McKim is also a visual artist, and his paintings have been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the Southeast. His artwork has recently been accepted for electronic publication in the poetry journals Viral Cat, Breadcrumb Scabs and The New Post-literate: A Gallery Of Asemic Writing. in the flesh of evening, windows push and pull deep afternoons through squares of lung. eons. just outside, the neighbor's kids ambulatory, percussive, imp as summer. your cellphone rings with the smell of spaghetti, like dishes, clanging. again, without success i try to scrape thick mosquito sunlight across the angry canvas of winter that crazy tree on the corner is that the faint swoon of lavender. on. brown, gnarled, limbs, twisting east? inside &yellowed, i'm making out with television sunset. & learning how to build skyscrapers without rulers, without numbers. Q&A How do you identify the trigger that begins the poetic process? The trigger that begins the poetic process for me is something unpredictable that reveals itself during the process of writing a poem. When I'm inside the poem an image will usually present itself when I least expect it and all it takes is a word or two to spark my imagination and that is when the poetic process begins in earnest. That is when the poem tells me what it wants to be. How much does the need to 'fictionalize' your thought that flows out as a poem influence what you write? The need to fictionalize my thought influences what I write quite a bit. I like to create poems that are fictional and in a lot of ways they are like paintings. I would write autobiographical poems, but my life is way too boring for that. Do you seek feedback from anyone, any group, as you write or is it a purely private, solitary process? Writing for me is a solitary process. I do get feedback from a group sometimes, but that is usually just in the form of encouragement. I have no formal training in writing poetry. When can you tell a poem is finished, that is, not in need of further polishing? I tend to write myself out of my poems. When I write a poem, I get very excited about what I've done, but when I step back from the poem for a couple of hours or a couple of days or weeks and then step back inside the poem I usually edit it and that usually means removing things that are not essential. Which of your senses (tactile, olfactory, visual, auditory, heart) is your most reliable or most often used launching pad? My visual sense is my most often used launching pad when I write poetry. I'm a visual artist as well as a poet and I've been painting a lot longer than I've been writing poetry. My approach to poetry is almost like making a painting in that it's a composition of images more so than a story or a narrative. The poem "interfenistration" is not so much telling a story as it is a collection of snapshots of familiar images and people and places close to me. poetsandartists.com 31 Alison Cherry is an artist who specializes in figurative painting and portraiture. Born and raised in London, Ontario, her dedication to fine art began at a very young age. In secondary school Alison attended H.B. Beal's BealArt vocational school, where she received intensive training in a wide variety of mediums including printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, textiles, sculpture, ceramics, animation, film and commercial art. After graduating from the BealArt vocational school she moved to Toronto, where she earned her BDes Bachelors Degree in Illustration from the Ontario College of Art & Design. After receiving her degree she dabbled in the world of design, but found that painting remained her true passion. She has since been pursuing her painting and illustration practice, showing in small galleries and group exhibits, and producing commissions for private collections. Alison continues to experiment with classical techniques while drawing on her design experience, and has currently focused her attention on building up her body of work. Her most recent work focuses on personal themes of passion, desire and strength. These paintings are dynamic studies of the beauty and the frivolity of physical ornamentation, which serve as a contrast to her more intimate and powerful depictions of the nude figure. Alison currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Nude oil pastel on paper 36"x48" poetsandartists.com 33 Q&Am Mi Chata Ya No Me Quiere (Series) oil pastel on paper 1 9"x28" ison Cherry Do you have a ritual you follow before each new work is started? I love to paint for long, uninterrupted 10-12 hour stretches, so my favorite way to work is to tidy up my studio and the rest of the house the night before. This not only gives me time to mentally prepare to work, but also allows me to ensure that there will be no distractions when I do go to work. As I am sure many artists who have studios in their homes understand - it is very important to be able to disconnect from your surroundings and the general, day-to-day distractions in your life in order to be truly productive. I try to get a good night's sleep the night before and then I'll wake up very early in the morning and I'll have something to eat (because I usually forget to when I'm painting!). Then I'm ready to start my work for the day; relaxed and energized, in a nice clean studio. Painting is very calming to me, but I tend to get very anxious beforehand, stressing nonstop about the piece and my interaction with it. So the main goal of these rituals is to keep myself positive, inspired and focused. What is your pet peeve? (regarding today's art scene) The biggest problem I have with art today is this obsession with the idea of a "concept". Some people are so busy trying to be witty or deep, worrying only about the meaning behind a painting, that they overlook the importance of quality workmanship and of creating something beautiful. I see this sort of thing so much now and it makes me very sad for the artists of our generation. I don't think it's acceptable to just throw something together without any consideration for the visual appeal. It makes the artist look like they couldn't care less about the quality of the piece they are creating, and, in turn, it feels like an insult to the viewer. In my mind, art is supposed to be something rare and very special; something honest and deeply heartfelt. All artists have something to say or an emotion to convey, but I think It's important to remember that art is a visual way of communicating and for that reason a work should be able to speak for itself - if it can't - maybe the artist should be writing a book instead. Another thing that artists need to remember is that all viewers will see artwork in a different way and each piece will resonate with them in a different way too - how unfortunate that many contemporary artists cannot accept this fact and feel the need to control that natural interpretation with their own message. Imposing an opinion on a viewer is not only distracting, but it will also keep the viewer from truly enjoying the energy and emotion that a piece of artwork can bring to them. How does your family life come into play with your artistic life? 34 poetsandartists.com Mi Chata Ya No Me Quiere (Series) oil pastel on paper 1 9"x28" Thankfully I come from a long line of creative people. My great-grandmother was one of the first female students to attend the Ontario college of Art & Design and was a wonderful landscape painter, my father is a cartoonist, my sister is a painter, and everyone else is either a photographer, a writer, musician or a textile artist. They understand the value and importance of art, so it's never been an unnatural career choice for me to make, and they have never been anything but supportive. My partner, Rocco, is an artist as well. I have always thought that two strong-minded artists could never coexist, but I am starting to realize now how lucky I am to live with someone who understands how much time and dedication it takes to pursue the career I have chosen. How have social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and others come into play with your art? I gave Facebook a try. This is a fantastic tool for promoting your work and keeping in touch with other artists, but for me, it just doesn't work. I feel like I already have very little time to get work done, so when I get a free moment I would much rather spend that time drawing or painting and being productive, rather than spending it online watching other people live their lives. What is your preferred medium and why? While I am a drawer by nature and the majority of my current work is done in oil pastels, I have recently gone back to oil painting and have absolutely fallen in love with it again! It's such a beautiful, classic and versatile medium. You just can't get the same glowing effects, depth or durability with any other medium. As I mature in my work I am finding that durability is becoming of greater importance, and that's hard to get when you are working on paper. When you spend so much time on a piece you want it to last, especially if it's going to be transported for shows or hung in a client's home. At the same time, I also really love lithography and textile arts. ...It's so hard to pick just one! Have you ever edited your work or censored anything for fear of offending someone? My favorite subject is the female nude, so I hear a lot of comments and criticism about that. As an artist I think that it can be very dangerous to listen to other people's opinions about your work. I try my best to disregard an opinion when is not constructive or if it come from an overly conservative source; in cases like this, I know that there is nothing vulgar about my work, so I never feel that I have anything to apologize for. I would like to say that I'm always successful at standing my ground, but poetsandartists.com The Fox Fur oil pastel on paper 36"x48" sometimes, especially with more conservative clients, I will try to meet them halfway. Let's just say that it's a good thing I love fashion as much as art, so I don't mind covering the girls up every once in a while. Typically, I have found that if I don't react to the criticism and keep working the way I want, people usually come to see that it's not such a big deal after all. Why are you a painter? Since I was a little girl I was always very shy, but inside I have a lot to say, so my artwork has always served as a means of communication. People are very responsive to art and it's amazing how deeply it can make them feel; how much you can communicate with one single image -without even saying a word! I'm not at all interested in superficial conversation, and artwork helps you bypass that and get to the heart of things. My entire life I have been obsessed with the work of the great artists, who were mostly painters. In my mind it is the most respected, authentic and classic medium. I know how much it moves me to see an amazing piece of artwork, and the thought of being able to make other people feel that way is the reason that I am an artist. How long does one of your pieces take to finish? I used to be able to take my time and work only when I was inspired, but when you are trying to make a living from your artwork, you tend to lose a bit of that luxury. Generally, my pieces take anywhere from 2 months to 1 year, depending on the medium and size of the piece. 36 poetsandartists.com Self Portrair In White Dress oil pastel on paper 23"x32" "Created primarily using oil paint and pastels, my work is an amalgamation of the more formal and direct qualities used in traditional portraiture and the bold, sexualized themes often found in contemporary fashion photography. The fusion of these styles allows my work to convey a feeling that is both classic and modern, dark and beautiful, while my use of underlying narratives add depth and a more progressive approach to each piece." — Alison Cherry poetsandartists.com 37 Simone Muench www.simonemuench.com Q&A Simone Muench is the author of four books: The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; Sarabande, 2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Disappearing Address co-written with Philip Jenks (BlazeVOX, forthcoming). She is a recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, a VSC Fellowship, the 49th Parallel Poetry Award, the Charles Goodnow Award, the AWP Intro Journals Award, the Poetry Center's 9th Annual Juried Reading Award and the PSA's Bright Lights/Big Verse Contest. Her work has been published in Poetry, The Believer, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review and others. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and now directs the Writing Program at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies. Additionally, she serves on the advisory board for Switchback Books and Universe: A United Nations of Poetry, and is an editor for Sharkforum. She is a vegetarian and a horror film fan. Do you seek feedback from anyone, any group, as you write or is it a purely private, solitary process? Writing is both solitary and shared, and I enjoy the communal and dialogic aspect of writing poetry as much as the solitary delight of it. My colleague, Jackie White, and I meet every other Thursday for "scholarship" day. Since we both work about 50-70 hours a week, it helps to structure 3-4 hours bi-weekly in which to write and discuss poetry. Writing can be a twin(n)ing act, vitally collaborative and multiple in nature: Jack Spicer's idea that "the poet likes to think that s/he's a pitcher, but really s/he's a catcher." I have written collectively with various poets including Kristy Odelius, and even though our poems weren't spliced together in a co-authored manner, we utilized each other as writing accelerators, allowing for thought and language leakage. I've also written with Bill Allegrezza, and currently I work collaboratively with Philip Jenks. We have a book of epistolary poems, Disappearing Address, forthcoming from BlazeVOX. Collaboration is a shared interaction in which I seek release from my solitary ruts and routines: the desire to stretch myself out of my own solipsism and rituals. I also appreciate the structure and challenge another writer provides to the writing process. The act, and art, of collaboration is explored within my classes as well, since collaboration often creates a much more enjoyable, and non-aggressive competitiveness. When I'm teaching creative writing I subscribe to the exhilaration, versus the anxiety, of influence, assigning centos, imitations, and exercises based on collective group constructions, in which student groups create their own poetic forms. The idea is to have them work from the inside out, and the outside in, creating forms that they will then utilize to write poems, so that they are privy to both the architectural and imaginative sides of poem-building, as well as the singular and communal aspects of writing. What is your revision process? I tend to be on the five-year plan when it comes to book-assembly, and revision is a significant part of that process. After initially thinking my last book, Orange Crush, was completed, I received feedback that it could use more structural support, so I spent an additional year reconstructing it. In terms of individual poems, I sometimes revise at a micro-management level, fine- tuning each line; and other times, poems are reworked more holistically. I try to put 38 poetsandartists.com poems away for a while until I can revisit them later as a guest editor; and, in this manner, I am able to re-see them with a more objective editorial eye. When I arrive at the book stage then I send my manuscript out to a few good friends and editors, such as Hadara Bar-Nadav who is a deft and generous reader. How many publications do you subscribe to? Which publications are these? How many do you read cover to cover? Poetry, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Barrelhouse Review, Cinematheque Press, Eleven Eleven, Moonlit, The Common Review, American Poet and The Writer's Chronicle. There are several journals I love in which my subscription is up, and also quite a few online journals that I'm devoted to (blossombones, Wicked Alice) . However, after reading students' poems, colleagues' poems, friends' poems, and working on my own poems, I go through periods where I don't want to read anything poetry- related, so I just picked up the latest issues of Cineaste, CineAction, Film Comment and Harpers. (And though I would love to say I read these publications cover-to- cover, I rarely have the time. I read in a much more hopscotch fashion, but if the journal intrigues me, I frequent it.) Which of your senses (tactile, olfactory, visual, auditory, heart) is your most reliable or most often used launching pad? I tend to utilize all the senses, but primarily the initial trigger is audio-visual: the sound design and overall visual environment of a line, or stanza, that jumpstarts a poem; however, olfactory and kinetic imagery are often important to me as well for a poem's overall texture. What is your goal as a poet? To salute, to scrutinize, to begin, to discover news ways of moving, to connect, to be connected, to converse, to be in conversation with, to dialogue in a strange and vertiginous manner, to recreate, to luxuriate in language, to comprehend, to transcend, and as the great Larry Levis said: "The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it." The new work — the wolf centos — in which I'm repurposing pre-existing texts, is a way of playing the "dinner game": writing the script for the hypothetical dinner party where one asks "who would you invite for dinner?"; and, in this fashion, I am able to place poets in conversation with one another who wouldn't normally be in dialogue. The recombinant nature of the cento allows for both a recycling and reconfiguration, something old and something new, a la Girl Talk's fabulous mashups; and thus, the cento pays homage to influences and predecessors while beginning the conversation anew. Wolf Cento Having erased all the past like a false eye, under my skin I change dog to wolf muscling an outline on the chalky bone. I think of the heat that language weaves taking away the long countries — a rose near a wheat field & two red shadows falling out of the forests. Everything remains behind. I learned in the notebook lined by you, tree & by you, sentence that nothing was mine: not the wheat, the star. The noise will start tomorrow. (My parenthesis that was not supposed to last.) continued poetsandartists.com 39 Wolf Cento I have looked too long into human eyes. I have stood for a long time like a dream printed on paper while all the leaves leaked gold as the wolf sang once again — nerve-sprung & half electric in the dark tree of the self. You will always be at some border of a blue blade: a lunar landscape of wounds; a river net of anatomy. Your animal companion. Show them the marks left where you merged. Wolf Cento When tenderness seems tired, the girl nestles down in me with her she-wolf's mask, places a word in the hollow of my mute being. Impossible to be alone in language. We're between blue & good evening, heaving with brilliants: mortal glitter of the naked beach, the glass horizon. (It is the human that is alien.) Even with her severed tongue the she-wolf bathes herself in the blue vertigo in my mouth where the planets flicker. The orange tree breaks into foam & no god comes. 40 poetsandartists.com Simone Muench Wolf Cento In moon-swallowed shadows amid the tiger-purring greenery I take a wolf's rib & whittle it into little months little smokes & oblivion. Beautiful, those boys among the roses where fiery blossoms clot the light & we licked the blood off our paws. How many have died in sweeter morgues? It was all like a childhood picture: our windows ravenous as snow wolves & again a rose-petal falls in an empty bed. Wolf Cento We: spectators, always, everywhere with goldpinnacled hair & seascapes of a pale green monochrome, we wanted to be wolves: strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness — a step toward luck & a step toward ruin. Old circuits of animal rapture & alarm have stained the sun with blackened love. The question of the wolves turns & turns. [The Wolf Centos contain lines and fragments by the following: Eugenio de Andrade, Ingeborg Bachmann, Mario Benedetti, John Berryman, Yves Bonnefoy, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Rosario Castellanos, Jean Cocteau, Hart Crane, Michel Deguy, Robert Desnos, Christian Dotremont, Robert Duncan, Marcelle Ferry, Ferreira Gullar, Laurence Iche, James Joyce, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Yusuf al-Khal, Galway Kinnell, Yusef Komunyakaa, Larry Levis, Mary Low, Claire Malroux, Osip Mandelstam, Joyce Mansour, Robert Marteau, Friederike Mayrocker, Jeanne Megnen, Marianne Moore, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, Olga Orozco, Octavio Paz, Benjamin Peret, Alejandro Pizarnick, Vasko Popa, Rainer Marie Rilke, Amelia Rosselli, Edith Sitwell, Edith Sodergran, Philippe Soupault, Frank Stafford, Wallace Stevens, Georg Trakl, Maria Tsvetaeva, Tristan Tzara, Dara Wier, W.C Williams, Charles Wright] Simone Muench poetsandartists.com 41 F . Scott Hess fscotthess.openmuseum.org F. Scott Hess, born 1955 in Baltimore, Maryland, began to draw intensely at the age of seven. He grew up in a small Wisconsin town, and received a Bachelor of Science in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1977). Attracted by the dark tone, intense psychological content, and the level of technical skill displayed by artists in Prague and Vienna, Hess moved to the Austrian capital in 1978, attending the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts for five-and-a- half years. There he learned Old Master painting techniques, studied paint chemistry, drew thousands of figure drawings from life, and completed a year-long course at the Anatomy Institute. In 1979 Hess had his first solo exhibition in Vienna, quickly followed by exhibitions in Austria, Germany and France. In 1981 he received one of Austria's most prestigious awards for artists, the Theodor Koerner Award, presented by the Austrian President. In 1984 Hess moved to his current home of Los Angeles and in 1985 had his first American solo exhibition, followed by of over one hundred group and solo exhibitions, including venues in Europe, Taiwan, and Iran. His work is included in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institute, among others. In 1990 he received a Western States Art Federation award, and in 1991 a J. Paul Getty Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship. F. Scott Hess is represented by Hirschl and Adler Modern in New York and Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Los Angeles. . Scott Hess The Ledger oil on aluminum 24"x30" How does your family life come into play with your artistic life? My family has provided the impetus for the content in most of my paintings for twenty years. There are tensions and conflicts that naturally result from being an artist and simultaneously being a father. The former wants to be free, unburdened by responsibility and unconcerned with money, while the latter must be the responsible bread-winner. I was lucky, the works sold well over many years, and I could pull off being the selfish artist and an active, if not perfect, father. I channeled all of the conflicts that arise in a family back into the art. It enriched the subject matter. As my daughters grew, their issues and views of their world also worked into my content in a refreshing way. The very personal and intimate themes inherent in a focus on one's family have a funny way of connecting to universal themes that everyone can relate to. How have social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and others come into play with your art? Though many of my works have shown up online for years, I only started posting my work in February of 2010 athttp://fscotthess. openmuseum.org/ . The site was small then, but it allowed me to attach preparatory sketches, art historical influences, and artist commentary to each piece. Then, to get more eyeballs, I joined facebook and had some 2000 'friends' in two or three months. Besides connecting with dozens of people whom I'd lost touch with (some for good reason!), new facebook friends came from all over the globe. This extensive network must be useful in ways that I have yet to fully grasp, so I'd say I'm still at an exploratory stage in this brave new world. Do you collect any art yourself and if so what if anything, was the first piece you sold or gave to someone? As director of the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation I collect objects and artifacts that relate to the genealogical history of my family. The most extensive unified collection within the Foundation is the work of itinerant Missouri painter Calvin Lemuel Hoole (181 1-1863), who was commissioned by my great-great grandfather to illustrate the Patton and Thomas family histories. A number of his paintings adorn my living room walls. His friend and mentor was George Caleb Bingham, and Hoole's works are similar in style. Though relatively unknown, Hoole's works are extraordinarily sensitive and refined. Have you ever edited your work or censored anything for fear of offending someone? 44 poetsandartists.com Anchises Lost oil on canvas 25"x35' Just by looking at my work you see that it doesn't hold back many punches. I have always sought to get under a viewer's skin, and some find that process offensive, disturbing, or lacking in taste. I have what I feel is important content to deliver and do that as powerfully as I possibly can. However, in layering that content sometimes a subtle delivery is more effective than a hammer blow. When I lived in Iran for a year (1 992-93) I was making work about that society, and had to be very careful. The content was there, but disguised. You had to be able to read the 'signs' to understand it fully. Do you believe art should serve a political purpose or remain neutral? The work I did in Los Angeles in the 80s, and during my year in Iran in the early 90s, was social/political in content, but toward the end of that period I was searching for a way to push my paintings away from that surface subject matter. I wanted work that went deeper into the psyche and was not to be explained in a few sentences. At a time when the art world was going flatter and more easily and quickly readable, I wanted more depth and mystery. I want to lead the viewer down a path, and then open up a myriad of possibilities. Political art, on the other hand, wants all paths to converge on a narrow and 'correct' viewpoint. Why are you a painter? I started drawing extensively when I was seven years old. My parents' divorce made me turn to art in an attempt to magically control my world. Now, many years later, I think all art is, and always has been, engaged in creating meaning in a meaningless universe. In the hands of the individual artist, or at the service of church or state, or as used by an advertiser or a cartoonist, art papers-over the void. We humans are addicted to meaning as much as we are to oxygen, food, and water. Artists are pushers of meaning. I turned to painting in my early twenties after years of work with just pencils. The type of painter I would become was a result of narrowing down choices; some paths were too artsy-fartsy, others too cold, or too hot, too cerebral, or too emotional. Eventually I felt the most honest approach was through a form of realism, but I hated the term. I'm a reluctant realist because the label is freighted with sentimental tripe and prejudiced expectations. In addition, the images I paint come out of my head more than from the observed world. Realism is a completely inadequate description of what I produce. poetsandartists.com 45 ABOVE: Transfiguration oil on canvas 35"x25" RIGHT: The Rope Walker oil on canvas 73"x59" Introspective: The Rope Walker The Rope Walker was in my head for two years before I finally got it started, so it had a long time to percolate. My neighbors next to my old Echo Park studio were aerialists, and I'd see them practicing in their backyard when I went up to work. There would often be a crowd of performers at their home in the evenings, bar-b-queing and drinking, with slack- liners, juggling, and harness flying. No one paid much attention. For them it was commonplace. It was their work. The composition is based on Watteau's Pierrot in the Louvre. His work was often a dialogue on the artist and his place in 18th century French society. I saw a possibility for an update of that idea, and took the rope walker as my artiste. The initial vision was set at twilight, and it was important that I maintain that. A giant tree two doors down served as the inspiration, but I never saw light hit it like that. I had to invent. The Watteau lighting is midday and bright. By shifting away from daylight a number of things had to be balanced out in the composition. I had to add a light source for the party in the background, as I wished to keep the relationship of the very light figures against the performer's left leg. With the stronger colors in the sky, and the red light hitting the trees, I also had to pump up the colors elsewhere. The figure in red is more intense than in the Watteau, and aqua enhances his pants and illuminates the pool in the background. Unlike the static Pierrot, the central figure is struggling to keep his balance, and is more contorted because of that. The orange slack-line, and the string of lamps, run back into space along the path from which he has come, while the balance bar crosses that at a right angle. By emphasizing great depth and slightly skewing the central figure's relationship to the picture plane, the 'frontality' that made the Watteau so popular an image with modernist audiences is cancelled OUt. F. Scott Hess 46 poetsandartists.com Steven Gulvezan http://www.mysterywriters.org/user/607 Steven Gulvezan was born in Detroit and has spent his career as a library director and a journalist. He has a master's degree from Wayne State University. His fiction and poetry have appeared in over twenty different literary publications. He spends his time writing poetry and short stories and taking long walks. He is an avid tennis fan, a prolific reader, a member of the Mystery Writers of America and a film aficionado. He resides in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan with his wife, Karen and his dog. Yogi. Madonna Off the Alley The broken little shrine nestled forgotten Among weeds in some flagellant's backyard I meander crookedly past avoiding my own Demons I wonder who placed you there Some Catholic some believer some person Who once took the trouble to purchase you and Lug you into their garden when life was roses And sunshine perhaps they were newly Married and establishing a home and hopes And dreams were fresh in the morning and Their street had not yet flooded with sorrow Driving them to the whip and the hair shirt The barbed wire wound tightly constricting Their breathing in the darkness of their being Drapes drawn shades pulled sucking from A bottle watching endless TV anaesthetized For now waiting hopefully for death I know this person well perhaps it is someone Close to me closer than I suspect as I meander Along the boulevard dreaming my dream Q&A How do you identify the trigger that begins the poetic process? I can tell you about the process behind the writing of this particular poem, "Madonna Off the Alley." I was out walking my dog very early one morning. At a side street intersection we passed a house that had fallen into disrepair - unpainted, the torn window shades pulled low.. .we walked along the side of the house and then past the backyard, which was overgrown: at the very rear of the yard, untended and tangled in weeds, was a shrine to the Virgin Mary; beyond this Madonna was a rusted chain-link fence and then the alley. The scene made an impression on me visually and emotionally. When we returned home from the walk I sat down and wrote the poem. Which of your senses (tactile, oifactory, visual auditory, heart) is your most reliable or most often used launching pad? It pleases me that you list "heart" as a sense. Although touch, smell, sight, taste, or sound may stimulate my poetic process, it is my heart, or my emotional intelligence - such as it is - which catapults my words into meaningful verse. How much does the need to 'fictionalize' your thought that flows out as a poem influence what you write? I believe that there is a fine line between fiction and reality. I consider myself a disciple, in words, of the great sculptor, Alberto Giacometti - 1 try to scrape away layer upon layer of the mask of fiction to get at some inner reality, but with each layer that I expose I discover that there is another layer of fiction - not reality - beneath it. What is your revision process? To write the first draft of a poem, I need a short burst of creative energy. It takes a longer burst of this energy to write the first draft of a short story. After these initial spurts of creativity, the rest is sheer joy - 1 love revising things I've written. I revise until I feel that a piece is good enough to be considered more-or-less complete. When can you tell a poem is finished, that is, not in need of further polishing? My poetry is never really finished. I consider all of my poems as stories - an idea pops into my head and I try to put it down on paper as quickly as I am able to. Later, over and over again, I rearrange the words to try to tell the story the best way that I can. At some point, it simply feels okay and I am more-or-less satisfied with it and at that point I consider it finished - at least for the time being. A week, a month, a year later I usually revisit it and see words and passages that I consider changing, re-arranging or excising completely. I'm never really totally satisfied with anything I write. There is always room for improvement. 48 poetsandartists.com Sheila E . Murphy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_AAurphy Sheila E. Murphy's most recent book publication is Toccatas in the Key of D (Blue Lion Books, 2010). She is a prolific poet and visual poet, who frequently collaborates on book-length projects with others. Recent titles include Quatemity (with Scott Glassman, Otoliths Press, 2009); Permutoria (with K.S. Ernst, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2008), and how to spell the sound of everything (with mIEKAL aND, Xexoxial Editions, 2009). Murphy lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Q&A First How do you identify the trigger that begins the poetic process? I hear a string of sounds that vibrates its way into a musical life form that my hands take to the screen or page and make them language. Do you seek feedback from anyone, any group, as you write or is it a purely private, solitary process? Yes. I have a primary editor who sees a very small fraction of what I write. When there's a poem that many people are likely to see, we review the piece together and sometimes edit repeatedly. Otherwise, no one sees the work before I complete it. Is writing daily important to your gestational period of arriving at the moment of finding something you want to say? Yes. My hands are most alive on the keyboard, in a notebook, on a drawing pad, and the poems find me, rather than the other way around. Which of your senses (tactile, olfactory, visual, auditory, heart) is your most reliable or most often used launching pad? Auditory, olfactory, heart. If someone offered you one million dollars to never write a poem again, would you accept the offer? I would counter-offer and negotiate so that we would both win. Oak leaves veer toward a collective noun, Neglect posed to seem like innocence. The husband retreats into a wood shop, Smoothing edges of a table of passivity. Each destination is the state of closed eyes Knowing the way and failing to be moved. A good grade of green tea chastens midnight, Even with a storm approaching the broad yard. Responsibility is leavened always, someone Measures something missed or added to excess. What we sip together must not be swallowed. Thinking of commodities must be scratched. Compositions define morning as we learn it In the grades: fresh, evolving, to be tuned. Second The man responsible for clipping vines along the walkway Has let them cross like lazy jump ropes somebody might fall across. When the home team wins, I smell smoke across our neighborhood. I hear brass instruments exhaust the visible breath of players in dark blue. Serenity occurs to other people I might ask about experience. A little of our separateness might go a long way. Practice rooms full of trace elements come pre-recorded. I can feel mistakes pile up in my dark red velvet case. Study of old texts begins when leaves fall. One retains broad summer shade leaves only in the mind. poetsandartists.com 49 All images courtesy of Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa. Deborah Poynton PAINTING AS A REDEMPTIVE NECESSITY by Grady Harp GATHERING information for her paintings has taken Deborah Poynton on a journey to many places and experiences and it is possibly this plethora of exposure that allows her to distill so many aspects of reality in her impressive and disturbing images. Born in Durban, South Africa in 1970 in a place lush with the tropical magic of nature, Poynton's parents, founders of an anti-apartheid center, died when she was a child, leaving the artist to disjointedly move into adulthood in schools in Swaziland, England and Washington, DC. Her decision to become an artist took her to Rhode Island School of Design, but her longing for her roots drove her back to Cape Town, South Africa where she continues to live and create her extraordinary paintings that have found exhibitions in South Africa, Germany, Denmark and the United States. Poynton's paintings are arresting in both the technical facility with which she paints as well as the subject matter she choses to explore. First encounters with her images create a near magnetic force between the viewer and the painting: an approach/ avoidance conflict is created because these works demand being examined but are at first so disturbing that the viewer feels like a voyeur. Her technique is Realism but the manner in which she paints is so real that it creates a sense of the unreal: are these pictures meant to shake our sense of complacency or strike a match to view some miscreant secret. The artist, immersed in her craft, explains her approach to painting well. 'Realism con be so deceptive. I see my reolism as a thin veil, literally a thin pointed skin over the nothingness 50 poetsandartists.com "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." ts eim behind everything. We try to defend ourselves from this void. We fill our lives, with stuff, talk, distraction. We exert power over others to try to feel less powerless. My paintings are full of stuff but they do not feel particularly secure. I will face you with nakedness to communicate a longing and a terror of connection, and this is why realism is the only thing I want to do, because it seems so close. It is beautiful, sumptuous, and a complete illusion. It is utterly unavailable. You can't get in there. It is having and wanting at the same time. This is the only way I know in which to reflect the essence of life, which is to hold things that are incompatible. We long for intimacy, but fear it. We make beauty an impossibility, and cover ourselves up for shame. We confine ourselves to try to feel safe, and find ourselves imprisoned. We control others to keep them close, and find ourselves alone. ' Poynton's paintings tend to be very large, almost cinematic, and they unfold a story that is often physically divided into multiple panels, yet each element relates to every aspect of the total image. In To be alone poetsandartists.com 51 ABOVE: To be alone BELOW: Beloved Untitled 2007 "We spend so much of our lives navigating a sea of complex and conflicting signals, distracted and frustrated by random obstacles to understanding; doing our best along the way to avoid the conflict and sadness that combine to defeat our best intentions. Our task is a harvest of confusion, winnowing kernels of value from the cascade of screaming chaff - finding in the residue a hook to hold memory, an anchor to SlOW lOSS/ 7 Wes Christensen the central panel reveals a young nude couple lying on a bed, both distracted by other thoughts than the proximity of being together, while on the left panel an elderly nude male sits on what appears to be that same bed, staring at nothing but perhaps his past desires. The right panel is an elderly nude female curled up in thought, appearing weary as though attempting to engage the viewer's eye in her plight of loneliness. The accoutrements of windows opening onto night, a small table with what might be evening food, and a chest with strange contents spilling out of a drawer and stacked with coats or clothes - all are real elements that appear to add to the painter's unifying story, if there is one. In Beloved and elderly woman rests in a room filed with beautiful furnishings except that the positioning of her body seems to echo the cold image of a telephone that may not have been used for some time. In Untitled 2007 an elderly nude couple lie side by side on a bed surrounded by the paraphernalia of today: perhaps they are post-coital or lost in memory of their once active sexuality. An intricately detailed Christmas tree is the foreground for two young boys in the left panel of the diptych / was there now while the right panel of the painting deals with two nude adult couples on the same bed: the correlation of these two parts deals with the complexities of internal human experience. 52 poetsandartists.com / was there now How do these strange images emerge and coalesce into such successful works of art? '/ don't plan much. The first step is to photograph someone. I direct them until that moment comes when I recognize an emotional texture, a stillness that contains tension. Then I take the photographs. I place that figure with paint on the white canvas, then decide if I need others, and a space begins to define itself. The painting talks back to me and demands certain things. It is a relationship of trust, a way of trusting myself. Sometimes it feels like a monster that I am servicing, because it is so many hours, and consumes me. But when I don't have it I realize how much I need it. Painting is a redemptive necessity for me, a way of transforming my life into something that takes on a life of its own, it's a membrane between what we think is real and what really is. It is a place without words, a stage, a place of refuge, a mirror, a garden. ' "You may say that people look for meaning in everything, but they don't. They've got life going on around them, but they don't look for meaning there. They look for meaning when they go to a movie. I don't know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn't make Sense." David Lynch poetsandartists.com 53 Peter Ramos Peter Ramos' poems have appeared in Painted Bride I Quarterly, Verse, Fugue, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, The I Chattahoochee Review, Mississippi Review (online), Slipstream, Meridian, elimae and other journals. Nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize, he is the | author of one book of poetry. Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008), and two chapbooks: Watching Late-Night Hitchcock & Other Poems (handwritten press 2004), and Short Waves (White Eagle Coffee Store Press 2003). He has criticism and other scholarly publications featured in College English, The Faulkner Journal, The CEA Critic, Mandorla, Verse, The Oxford American, and Latino Poetry Review. An assistant professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth -century American literature. Hawaiian Tropic True, blondes luxuriated back there & by their delicate feet swimming lines wobbled under gelatinous blue, pure sheen from coconut oil rubbed onto their limbs and deeper in the shadowed valleys or young mothers in glinting makeup, jewelry and one-pieces, the wet fabric clung to skin God did I lean toward them back then and do their keys and earrings, long cigarettes the supple and buxom in almost nothing at all but lipstick nailpolish and anklets broiling in sun and chlorine fumes, illicit their chemical scent, some dark and ripening fruit I would but could not touch. All that yearning then, and now — perhaps the same desire: stillness and discipline. Vision. A will. 54 poetsandartists.com Wisdom Teeth Something had to give that summer and did — as you pissed away paychecks and woke sweating each day. Broiling Baltimore! Broken glass on the pavement and knee-high weeds. By noon no one, not even the homeless, got caught on those sidewalks but you, already on your way to the Mount Royal Tavern. Then home again to sleep, your two-room single strewn with greasy wrappers, tall-boys and porn, still a hundred degrees by evening. You painted an old professor's porch for rent. In June, you'd seen your mother with suitcase descending for good the stairs of your childhood home, your father at the table's head, mute, dazed and undone. Simmering and grim on a four-month bender — your girlfriend away — you ranted till they disconnected the phone and withheld your TA. In August you went under, toward something like sleep, nitrous oxide's "twilight," the surgeon's whisper booming your ear, his rubber fingers and hard instruments pressed out your drool, and then a crunching sound, cranial-deep, like a phonebook ripping apart. They stuffed you with cotton, and there, when you came to, fresh from New York was a girl you'd almost marry caressing your cheek, the blinded room, her parent's, air-conditioned for sleep, your mind finally dulled under Percocet's liquid heaven. Why go there now, why hold on to those bloody molars, your ingrown and bone-aching twenty-something teeth? Q&A How do you identify the trigger that begins the poetic process? Usually it happens in language-a surprising word or combination of words, sometimes found already made, as in street signs. There's a town somewhere in the west called "Blue Earth." I never used that in a poem, but there it is-on a sign paid for by the federal government. For some reason, also, half-remembered images or smells or events, those that happened at the threshold of language acquisition, are very powerful for me. John Kennedy's assassination, the moon landing, Vietnam, muscle cars, anachronistic rancher-style motels along old highways-these things were happening, or had just happened, when I was very young, so for me they have a strange religious or spiritual quality to them. Anything that resonates or vibrates, hums or flashes seems to be a good start or trigger for a poem; any signifier whose materiality or thing-ness AS a signifier reveals itself is a good place to start. Do you seek feedback from anyone, any group, as you write or is it a purely private, solitary process? Certainly I seek feedback from others. Lately I have been lucky enough to meet and get to know people at residencies or conferences whose work I like, and they have generously looked over my poems and new manuscript. When can you tell a poem is finished, that is, not in need of further polishing? When I no longer get out of bed at three AM because a line from that poem is bugging the shit out of me. I guess that means, when the poem leaves me alone. Why does this poem suck? Why would you publish a poem that sucked? What is your goal as a poet? My goal is to keep writing and submitting poetry. I'm 41 and have been writing poetry in a more or less serious way for more than 20 years now. It only gets harder. I also sometimes fear that one does one's greatest artistic works before (or around the time) one reaches the age of 30, which means I'm screwed. poetsandartists.com 55 Alexandra Manukyan www.alexandramanukyan.com Alexandra Manukyan was born and raised in Armenia, and since a very young age has been interested in fine arts and spent many years studying painting, drawing and sculpture. She graduated art school, college, and State Pedagogical University as an art major in Armenia. After immigrating to the States, she continued her education and majored in Fashion and Graphic design. Her diverse background is directly reflected in her artworks. Currently she lives and works in Los Angeles. Alexandra has held and participated in solo and group exhibitions in America and abroad. Q&A How has digital accessibility come into play with your work? As a graphic designer I have learned to think and design in Photoshop and Illustrator, and they greatly facilitate the compositional mapping and manipulation for my art projects. I think digital media is an incredible tool for a modern artist. What is your preferred medium and why? I work exclusively in oil paints. I like working with a medium that doesn't dry fast, and I always have the ability to push wet oil paint to model the shapes and forms in my paintings. I also like the rich texture and vibrancy of oil paint after it dries. I do a lot of glazing on my paintings, and from my experience I can get the best results in transparency and luminosity with oil paints only. What tool and supply can you not live/work without? Well, for the artist who paints with oil paint on canvas, I should say, supply is oil paints; tool is paint brush that I personally wouldn't be able to work without. 56 poetsandartists.com Escape oil on canvas 36"x36" What painting do you have hanging in your living room? In my living room I have hanging my 'Broken Music' and 'Mechanics of Manipulation' paintings. Why are you a painter? I absolutely believe that one has to be born to be a painter or a musician. Since I was a child I have always been painting or drawing. I have always had the urge to paint, I become very irritated or moody on the days I don't get the opportunity to paint or draw. How long does one of your pieces take to finish? Depending on the complexity of composition it takes me anywhere from three weeks to a couple of months to finish a piece. I work in multiple layers, and I always allow drying time between each layer. Explain your work process. I always start with Imprimatura, meaning an initial stain of color. It provides me with a toned ground. This is the way Renaissance artists worked. Then I start drawing my objects paying close attention to accuracy of drawing, then after the drawing layer is dry I build the underpaying layer. I then allow these two layers to dry. I start painting successive layers of colors giving each layer time to dry before applying the next coat of paint. My final stage is glazing, which is a semi- transparent layer. poetsandartists.com ST 58 poetsandartists.com Victory oil on canvas 24"x36" Mechanics of Manipulation oil on canvas 30"x40' poetsandartists.com 59 "I paint in oil paints and use vivid colors to exude the perpetual turmoil which exists inside the human core. I dress my characters in lush drapery or colorful costumes with intricate and specific details to give them definable personalities. I capture my characters during mysterious and intriguing interactions. The gestures and facial expressions of my characters as well as surrounding atmosphere exhibit dynamics within human beings and relationships." —Alexandra Manukyan 60 poetsandartists.com Broken Music oil on canvas 30"x40" The Dream oil on canvas 36"x36" Introspective: The Dream In the painting 'Dream' I combine traditional figurative painting techniques with surrealism and symbolism. I had to properly orchestrate four figures, and correlate them with color, light, values, size and position in order to demonstrate the hierarchy of importance of the characters. My goal was to properly balance cold and warm colors as well as the collision of metal and cloth. It was really challenging to make metal outfits, and heavy drapery balance with light transparent tulle tutu of ballerina. The painting eludes mysterious and intriguing interactions between four different characters through the contrast if light to dark, cold to warm, and metal to soft cloths. Alexandra Manukyan poetsandartists.com 61 Harger Boal Q&A Harger Boal was born in Indianapolis, Indiana but raised in Michigan. He is currently a graduate student at Northern Michigan University and living on the shores of Lake Superior. A friend to trees, books, gardens, home brewed beer and dogs. At home in libraries, woods, classrooms, local bars, churches and basements. The Moon of Making Fat From my porch tonight the orchard glows a bright apple blossom white, and two, no three, spring deer tip-toe out and out into the rows of apple trees to root for the last of last year's fruit, coaxed into view by the moon of making fat. I breathe night in like sugar and then I'm out in the back forty again, a boy standing on a cistern, stretching on tip-toes to see a woman, migrant pickers spread around her, her skirt hiked-up higher than my sister's when she pees outside. She's sick? I don't breathe so the winds do. She shakes like the branches above. Blossoms twirl down and around her knees and throat, dressing her in sun and soil, in shade and pollen, landing on her hair like ash against the night sky. How slowly petals fall to her legs and stick. I imagine picking them softly off, white moths on wet brown bark drying their wings in the breeze. She's quiet as apple petals shine against the blood on the baby's new skin. How do you identify the trigger that begins the poetic process? Usually I don't identify the trigger until later, sometimes days later. I recognize a fragment of a poem, the beginning or ending of a poem. One moment of a poem that looks back at me. Often when I think I'm writing something good it turns out to be a phony and when I'm just writing without trying too hard it turns into the beginning of a poem. One that can stand up and walk on its own. Then the hard work starts. How much does the need to 'fictionalize' your thought that flows out as a poem influence what you write? All thought is fictionalized isn't it? I certainly don't try to fictionalize it but thought by its very nature is a construction, a fiction. For me trying to get at a poem is more like trying to keep my intentions, motivations and ideas at bay. That way I'm as surprised and pleased as anyone by what ends up on the page. Do you seek feedback from anyone, any group, as you write or is it a purely private, solitary process? I seek feedback from people who I trust and whose poetic compass I believe in. I wait until I've done as much as I feel I can for the poem then let someone else read it and tell them to be as critical as possible. It has to be someone who will challenge the poem on some level because praise is cheap. Creation is definitely a solitary act but the poetic process is a communion. When can you tell a poem is finished, that is, not in need of further polishing? I often think a particular poem is done only to discover later it's incomplete. It's easy for me to believe a poem is never finished. That idea can be helpful because you're constantly feeling around for a stronger word or a more honest metaphor but at some point you have to stop. How else would you ever write anything new? Is writing daily important to your gestational period of arriving at the moment of finding something you want to say? Writing everyday is very important. It's probably the best thing you can do if you want to write a good poem. In my case I can feel myself building upon something everyday I write successively. When I miss a day it feels like I'm starting all over the next time I sit down to write and it can be hard to get going again. Even when you're writing just sucks that's when it's most important to keep writing everyday. I suppose it's like exercising. You can run farther and faster when you've been at it awhile. The same is true for the imagination. 62 poetsandartists.com Past Contributor David Jon Kassan (Born in Little Rock, Ar, 1977) is a contemporary American painter best known for his life-size realist portraits. The paintings combine figurative subjects with abstract backgrounds or "tromp I'oeil texture studies/' reportedly inspired by Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg. Of this dual representation strategy Kassan notes, "my effort to constantly learn to document reality with a naturalistic, representational painting technique allows for pieces to be inherent contradictions; paintings that are both real and abstract." David Kassan received his his B.F.A. in 1999 from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. He continued his studies at The National Academy, and the Art Students League of New York, both in Manhattan. Kassan currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches painting classes and workshops at various institutions around the world. Past Contributor www.stevendaluz.com Steven DaLuz is a versatile artist who is compelled to do work that conjures up a sense of mystery and ethereal light, whether figurative or abstract. His interests are evenly split between the two. While identified with abstract works that are often landscape-referential— employing a process he devised using metal leaf, oil, and mixed media, he is also known for figurative works that are poetic and introspective. He used the term, "Neo-Luminsim" in 2009 to classify his work using this process. His paintings often reflect upon primal questions about origins, the expressive beauty of the human figure, and the aesthetic power of light moving through an imagined atmosphere. Born in Hanford, California, Steve's art studies were interrupted by a decision to serve during the Vietnam War era after just one semester at San Antonio College. While serving in the Air Force, he completed a BA degree in Social Psychology, and an MA degree in Management. Throughout, he remained devoted to making art in his free time. After living 13 years in other countries, Steve retired from the Air Force, and re-engaged his lifelong passion for art by resuming his studies at San Antonio College, where he completed an AAS in Graphic Design. He completed the Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree (Summa cum Laude) in 2003, with a concentration in painting from the University of Texas at San Antonio. The City of San Antonio's Fiesta Commission selected DaLuz's painting, '"Dance of Fiesta" for its official Fiesta Poster for 2007. He was selected for acceptance into both the 2009 and 2011 Biennales in Florence, Italy, and his works have been published in art periodicals, such as Fine Art Connoisseur, The Artists, Art Calendar and Poets and Artists magazine, where he received the cover for the November 2009 Issue. He recently had two works selected for publication in the book, Strokes of Genius 3: The Best of Drowing, to be released in 201 1 . Naming his "72" exhibition one of San Antonio's Best exhibits for 2008, Dan Goddard, San Antonio Express-News Art Critic, called the artwork, "...perhaps the city's most creative response yet to 9- 1 1 ." He donates artwork and portions of proceeds from sales of his work to benefit many charitable causes. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Skopje, Macedonia, Artists Space, New York, NY, and many other commercial and university galleries. Widely collected, DaLuz's drawings and paintings are represented in private and corporate collections in 18 States and several foreign countries. Some of the corporate collectors of his work include: Citicorp Headquarters, Houston, Texas; Methodist Hospital-Stone Oak, San Antonio; Schell, Mitchell & Cooley, LLP, Dallas; Hermann Memorial Ambulatory Center, Houston; Hermann Memorial Southwest Vascular Institute, Houston; Orthopedic Specialists of Texas, Sugar Land, TX; and many others. DaLuz is listed in the Art in America Annual Who's Who in America, and the American Artist Bluebook. His work is represented by the AnArte Gallery, in San Antonio, Texas; Laura Rathe Fine Art in Houston, Texas; and Monarch Gallery in La Jolla, California. 64 poetsandartists.com Steven DaLuz Past Contributor http://eliq.mosaicglobe.com Angelique Moselle Price is an artist based out of Nashville, Tennessee. Creating art about people and their inspirational traits, she captures the essence of what makes humanity interesting and unique. She also creates characters out of her imagination that play out ideals and dreams she has for herself and others. Furthermore, she works in abstract concepts challenging the viewer to access their own connection to her work through feeling. Angelique exhibits her originals, prints and clothing all over the world. She has been published in various art magazines including "Poets and Artists", "Tattoos for Women", and "International Tattoo." She has been featured various times on the Juxtapoz, Red Bubble, Barebrush and Deviant Art websites. Moreover, she won the artist website competition forMosaicglobe.com. Price's heart is as big as her talent. She consistently contributes to charities to raise awareness and money for various causes. Some of these include, "Artrageous", "Holly Street Rocks", and "Moonbears.org. She has been a part of local charities for repairing her city after the flood, international charities sponsoring women and children as well as various Cancer Benefits. Angelique was born in Broken Bow, Nebraska in 1978. She attended 13 schools by graduation and settled down in Nashville where she still resides. She studied fine art at Belmont University and Watkins College of Art and Design. She also studied, and became a tattoo artist in 2005. Price has created a large body of work done entirely in markers. She has mastered this medium with remarkable skill resulting in an energetic and riveting execution. She has invented a method that makes her work stand out in its originality and vibrancy gaining her widespread recognition. She is also adept with acrylic, oil and watercolor paint. Her styles are vast in their differences and often seem as though they come from different artists. Angelique enjoys experiencing the art that manifests by allowing herself the freedom to flow from one medium to the next without expectation of what it will become. "Art is from my heart, and my heart wears the diverse wardrobe of our world with its beautiful depth and mystery." Tribute" Self Portrait Prismacolor and Sharpie markers on Bristol papaer 30"x44" This is a tribute to all of the artists that have tattooed me and to the artists whose art I have on my body. Their names are in the background. They are: Tim Bobeck, Camille Rose Garcia, Angelique Houtkamp, Matt Wolf, Inge Vandormael, Rachel Napier, Ben Johnson, Angelique Price, Jason St. Clair and Katie Wolf. 66 poetsandartists.com Past Contributor http://kamalkylaureano.carbonmade.com 4 Kamalky Laureano was born in Dominican Republic in a town called Higuey on the east region of the country where the only source of art was, local honest people trying to survive selling paintings of the beach and animals. During the times he spent in school, nothing mattered more to him than drawing which he started at the age of four. At the age of 18 in 2002, he began to study in the fine art school of Santo Domingo. Two years later he transferred to Altos de Chavon School of Design affiliated Parsons, NY. He has won two regional contests in his country 2001, 2002. His work has been exhibited in France, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Mexico and New York (November 2010). 68 poetsandartists.com Into the Dream II acrylic on canvas 1 1 0x1 30cm Past C o ntrib www.williamlazos.com William Lazos is a Toronto based artist showing his paintings in galleries in Toronto, New York, and London. 70 poetsandartists.com William Lazos Penny II acrylic on canvas 36"x40" poetsandartists.com 71 www.poetsandartists.com publishing as an art form